The Beautiful Miscellaneous Read online

  “I can’t wait to have you home. You can use his study. I’ve done a little tidying in there.”

  “Yes, it’s going to be nice,” I said flatly. “I’m not sure I’ll go to college in the fall.”

  “Well, we can see,” she said.

  We stared at the stage, waiting for something to happen. Here is grief, then, I thought, the wordless stare, an empty stage, my mother with the countenance of a vacationing nun.

  “Does Whit still come around the house?” I asked. My voice cracked on the word Whit. His name was Mustang red.

  She exhaled, brushed her sleeve. “He comes to dinner several nights a week. He’s good company for me.” She sounded defensive, slightly annoyed.

  Whit stood talking to Cal Saunders over by the ravaged cake. It was possible Whit and my mother were like kindred, grown siblings, platonic and rooted in mutual inclination, sensing the hunger and boredom of the other like bad weather brewing. They were content with the ministrations of a house, the mending and antlike diligence. Whit kept her car running, her house pest-free and in good repair. She needed someone to cook for, and he needed errands and lists of household defects on the refrigerator. They had struck an arrangement.

  “I was just asking,” I said.

  She looked back at the empty stage.

  THAT NIGHT TOBY, TERESA, AND I sat in the barn and drank from a Coke bottle refilled with Jack Daniel’s. At one point we saw Arlen wander past the open doorway. His face was drawn, his eyes maniacal. Was he talking to my father? Was he in the midst of a waking dream, scanning the sequoia in Arizona for a runaway? He bleared in our direction; the kidnapped and the murdered dogged him like an epic hangover.

  “He’s stopped being any good,” Teresa said quietly.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  She drank from the Coke bottle and passed it to Toby, whose eyes were shut. He said, “I can’t feel my body.”

  Teresa ignored him. “He calls the state troopers and tells them he’s found something, a corpse, whatever, and then they make the phone calls and they get the warrants and nothing. An old door or a child’s bicycle,” she said.

  Toby said, “Psychics bleed themselves dry. They’re like whores out in the desert.”

  “I have a job to go to,” I said.

  Teresa and Toby both looked at me. Toby said, “I’m no psychic but let me guess. You’ve been given a position with the CIA. They want you to memorize briefings and deliver them to operatives in the field. Or how about the Pentagon, they’ve got to have a use for your memory.”

  “I’ve got a job at the library in my hometown. It’s for the summer, but if I decide not to go to college in Madison, then I bet I could stay.”

  There was a long pause.

  Finally Toby said, “You can’t do that.”

  “What’s wrong with working in a library?” I asked.

  Teresa shrugged, her face somber with alcohol. She looked out through the barn door.

  “You cannot work in a library.” There was something indignant in Toby’s voice. “Go work on the fishing boats of Alaska or make trails in the Adirondacks, but for fuck’s sake don’t become a librarian. Please, I’m begging you. As a blind man.”

  “It’s easy for you two to say. You have real lives to go to,” I said.

  “I’m not saying anything,” Teresa said.

  “You don’t have to. I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, taking the Coke bottle from Teresa.

  A while later, Teresa and I went for a walk. Under a full moon, the house seemed very secluded, cut off from neighboring houses by acres of corn and soybeans and pasture. With its Victorian sprawl, the high windows, and lathe-work detail, it seemed out of place with the weatherboard houses of its neighbors, the humble pea-green and yellow boxes of hog and soy farmers. I remembered the day my father and Whit drove me here, before anything had been named or lost, and how the house had seemed like a ship, the steepled roofline like the warrior prow of some great battleship. There were moments, I realized, I simply wanted to bring back. I took Teresa’s hand and we crossed the lawn in front of the empty wooden stage. It had been over a month since I’d been inside the workshop and I wanted to see the facades and pillars of Roger’s city one more time. As we walked, Teresa looked up at the night sky and said, “I don’t know the names of any stars. I know pancreatic acids, but no stars.”

  I pointed west of the Big Dipper and said, “That’s Polaris. Over there is Saturn, low down.”

  the milky way moves at 1400000 miles per hour relative to microwave background radiation

  We stopped in front of the workshop. I put my hand under the step, pulled out the flashlight, and we went inside. The smell of sawdust and wood glue, the burnt smell of metal shavings, surely these were comfort smells for Roger, the kind of thing that could trance him toward sleep. In the back room I switched on a spotlight that hung from a metal beam and the city gleamed; it now had the formalized presence of an installation, something in a museum. We stood in silence. The peaked roofs with skylights, the terraced rooftop gardens and water towers were all there. No more buildings had been erected, but he’d added features on the ground: fire hydrants and bus stops and park benches, things that gave it human scale. And there were more models of people, molded from lead and wood, caught up in the city bustle, crossing in front of taxis, window-shopping, eating ice cream cones and hot dogs. Inside the stadium there was a single Yankees player—an outfielder with his mitt raised in the air.

  I picked up the baseball player. His features were too vague to know what Roger’s intention had been. A smear of black ink for a mouth, dots for eyes; it was the suggestion of a face. I placed him in various locations throughout the city: on a water tower, surrounded by tenement laundry, standing on top of a midtown high-rise. It seemed to be lunchtime; people were entering delis and downing hot dogs in the street, men in suits were walking through the park, a vendor was hauling his quilted metal cart in front of a glass-fronted department store. I placed the man in the park, beside the lunchtime joggers and the dog walkers. He stood atop a grassy knoll with his mitt in the air, as if a ball had been launched out of the stadium, across the domes and turrets and the city grid. Face turned skyward, body poised; the catcher was a monument to waiting.

  “Are we going to say good-bye?” Teresa asked.

  I looked at her. How her eyes and her wary mouth never betrayed her gift. I switched off the light and kissed her. We moved slowly toward the mullioned windows. My hand edged inside her jeans, the seam tight across the back of my knuckles. For a moment I stood behind her, her hips pressing my hand into the wall, and we both looked out onto the fields, where a neighbor’s horses stood grazing. The arc of their long necks, the swanlike dip of their heads into the grass, their bone-white flanks in the moonlight all seemed, in that moment, for our benefit.

  “We could do it,” I said. “Seems a shame not to.”

  “Here and now?”

  “Here and now.”

  I could hear the friction of my hand against her denim waistline. I unzipped her jeans and pulled them down to her knees. She drew breath suddenly, surprised, and blew some air against the chill glass. A cloud of moisture bloomed, then receded on the windowpane. I could see the dimple in the small of her back, the rise of her ass below the hem of her sweater. She put one hand against the window, framing the horses between her thumb and index finger. This seemed like the perfect place and time to lose my virginity, wedged between the sculpted city and the sight of horses feeding at midnight. Suddenly, the horses startled and cantered in the opposite direction. They wheeled and turned, spooked by something in the night. The moment vanished. Teresa took my hand.

  “Wait,” she said.

  “I really want to.” I kissed the back of her neck.

  “I want to, but…”

  “But what?” I said.

  “It needs to feel different than this.”

  She went quiet. I could feel her stomach rise and fall with each breath. She
turned around but found it hard to look at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay. We will sometime soon. We’ll visit each other. Do it in our childhood beds.” I felt her voice around me, consoling and suffocating.

  the lowest recorded note attained by the human voice was a staccato e in alt altissimo—

  I kissed her gently on the cheek, vaguely humiliated, and I could taste the saline of a tear in my mouth. I wiped her face with my sleeve. We held each other in the half-light of Roger’s workshop and there was nothing I wanted to say. I didn’t want to see the faded ribbon of my voice.

  thirty-five

  Grief—or the numbness that came with it—dulled the colors and shapes that trailed through the air. A white, hollow feeling raked at my thoughts. The citrus bite of certain words turned waxy. Memorizing had once been pleasurable but now it turned into a chore. I had to cajole life and character out of receding words and neutered objects. Without the bright contrail of dashes and lines, I lost the thread of meaning when I read. My brain started to insist that newspaper articles were really columns of hooped and stiff-backed symbols, ideas dotted down to black ink. The letter T was no longer a stern man with his arms outstretched.

  That summer I stopped memorizing and reciting facts. I walked the streets of my hometown during my lunch break and after finishing work at the library. A haziness clung to me. Sometimes I would end up on Main Street and inside a movie theater without remembering how I got there. I followed strangers, somehow drawn into their wake.

  One afternoon I was walking past the college campus, and a man who resembled my father—an outmoded beard, a certain stoop to his walk—crossed the street in front of me. He hurried down the sidewalk, carrying a briefcase and looking at his watch. He led me away from the sandstone arches and porticos of the college, down streets where college professors and dentists and lawyers lived. Third-acre plots with well-kept revival houses. As the man rushed along, his briefcase kept hitting him in the thigh. I stayed on the opposite side of the street. At the end of a block he reached into his trouser pocket and retrieved a single key.

  I stood behind a hedgerow and watched. He stepped up to a modest timber house with a sharply lit porch and several curtained windows. He opened the front door and I saw a long hallway, a hat stand with umbrellas and coats. There was no way to know for sure that he lived alone—the house was well tended, there were potted flowers here and there—but I guessed from the hat stand and the austerity of the hallway that he was a bachelor. A middle-aged man of few connections. A life reduced to a single key.

  He closed the door and I crossed the street to stand on the pavement outside his front door. There was a light coming from the back of the house and I crept down the side passage. I crouched low and looked through the kitchen window. He did not live alone at all. At a small table in a breakfast nook he sat with an elderly woman and rolled up her sleeve. She was in a nightgown and had the sunken aspect of the slowly dying. He took a small hypodermic needle from the table and injected a clear liquid into her arm. When the liquid was spent, he rubbed her arm a little and rolled down her sleeve. Her face was grateful, calm, somehow absolved. He stood up, loosened his tie, and began to make a salad. I don’t know why, but I stood outside their window, mesmerized by the sight of the man breaking lettuce and putting it into a wooden bowl.

  WHEN I GOT HOME I entered through the side door, trying to avoid Whit and my mother. The coffee table in the parlor was covered in books about grief. One of them depicted the seven stages of grief as street-name signs—Shock Street, Denial Avenue, Anger Boulevard. Grief was a city or an orderly suburb where people could drive their Buicks down Denial until they got pissed off and turned onto Anger. My mother, ever the pragmatist, wanted to know which block I was on. When I told her I didn’t know and to stop asking me, she took that as the broad, one-way boulevard of Anger.

  I could hear her bustling in the kitchen.

  “Nathan? Is that you?” she called.

  “I think so,” I said. “Were you expecting burglars?”

  “Come and have dinner. Whit and I are waiting for you.”

  It couldn’t have been later than five. Grief was a sentence of early dinners. I went into the kitchen, where the two of them stood by the refrigerator, a tableau of domesticity, smiling at me for no good reason. I had to endure this hour every evening. We sat at the table. In the three months I’d been home Whit had essentially moved in, sleeping in the guest room, and our evening meals had become an absurdist drama.

  My mother served herself some navy beans and passed them to me. “Take some beans, Nathan.”

  “I saw Die Hard again today,” I said.

  “I’m thinking of building a carport,” Whit announced.

  “Why? We already have a garage,” I said.

  He said, “The garage is storage. The carport would be for the cars.”

  “This lettuce tastes acidic. How’s the library?” my mother asked.

  “The library is exactly dull. Lettuce is alkaline, mostly water,” I said. I pictured the man breaking his lettuce, making a salad for the dying woman.

  “I spoke with a woman in Bahrain this morning…she grows grapes out in the desert. They sell oil for water. Her English was exemplary.” Whit had taken up ham-radio transmission in the basement.

  “I’d like to take a long drive tomorrow,” I said. “Minnesota maybe.”

  “Is that wise?” my mother asked.

  “Wear and tear, gas mileage decrease,” Whit cautioned over his plate.

  “I think your driving is a way of dealing with your father’s death. Most grief counselors say it’s better to do something physical and vigorous.”

  I imagined a paperback title: Hustle Your Way Through Grief! I said, “I’ll drive vigorously.”

  “What color would we make the carport, Cynthia, if I were to build one?”

  “Umber. Something Mediterranean. Some kind of sienna.”

  This went on for fifty-two minutes. After dessert I was excused from the table and made my way into the parlor. The house now seemed empty and cavernous; my mother had been busy with spring cleaning and a Goodwill drop-off. Darkness gathered in the corners. The Shaker furniture floated in lamplight like little ships of oiled teak and pine. It was an exact replica of the house I’d grown up in, but there was no proof of life—no errant home-brew bottles, no Charles Mingus ruminating and bouncing in from the study. Above the fireplace stood the antique urn containing my father’s ashes. It was Italian-looking and florid. Yellow ceramic curls lifting and peeling off a vanilla gloss. I stopped in front of it for a moment. It still seemed strange that it was his unhoused body sitting up there, pewter bone shards in white ash.

  I walked past my father’s study and looked in. Again, it was like a flawed reproduction; in real life he’d had towers of books in the corners, pyramids of scribbled paper. Now the books were pressed tightly together on the shelves and stray paper was nowhere to be seen. I sat at his desk. The one concession to the actual, lived past was a copy of a book open to the page he’d been reading before he died:

  It is possible that all four basic forces—strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravity—are really part of a single unifying force which is the source of all matter and energy. Prior to the creation of the universe, this force existed mainly in potentiality and occupied a total space of less than a pinhead in diameter.

  Beside it he had written, A pinhead seems much too large for all cosmic matter yet here i am sitting on top of the pinhead and death seems real.

  I left the book and went upstairs. Like the rest of the house, my room was curated, something behind glass. Everything was exactly as it had been when I was twelve, minus the laundry piles and the stash of Playboy s. My mother had long since rooted out all symptoms of my early puberty. Her hunches and suspicions permeated the walls of that house. She had a nervy clairvoyance that told her when things went awry, when an inflorescence of mold appeared in the refrigerator, or when I st
ood in my bedroom, smitten-faced at the sight of naked breasts.

  My bed was made with my childhood Superman sheets tucked with hospital corners. A solar system night-light sat on the side table. Why were so many of my childhood motifs about celestial flight? On the windowsill, blots of compounds were pressed inside microscope plates. A sheep’s brain swam inside a pickle jar, the embalming fluid brackish and strewn with particles. I sat on my bed, held the jar in my lap, and watched the brain sway and bob. It looked just like the human brain, the cross sections I remembered from Gray’s Anatomy. A brain up close looks like nothing so much as a gray undulating landscape, a terrain folded with fissures and ravines. The universe, my father said, evolves like an ever-expanding thought. And our brains were vehicles for this widening thoughtfulness—a membrane that weighs less than a loaf of hearty bread, that feels no pain, that transmits our memories between generations of neurons.

  thirty-six

  Dear Dad,

  I’ve been thinking about you lately. Arlen told me that you might have been writing letters before you died. Were they to me?

  You probably know this but I have a job at the town library shelving books—no NASA or MIT just yet. I know you thought genius was contagious. It’s not. I’ve decided to stop reciting stuff. The colors and shapes and tastes are fading.

  Whit is losing his mind and your wife cooks enough food every night to feed an army. All in all, things are just as you left them.

  So, what’s the unified field like? I read in your notebook the following: “The real study-object of physics is no longer a material phenomenon, such as a star, planet, liquid, gas, molecule, an atom, or an elementary particle, but the energy-rich ‘nothingness’ of the vacuum.” Can you create a vacuumout of a human life? A state where everything is possible but nothing very likely? Does something new emerge when there’s no more empty space?

  Love,

  Nathan